Nineteenth-Century American Literature Research Articles

The Forest “Appeared Alive with its Sons and Daughters”: Commodification of the Indian Body in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Abstract The phrase “son/s of the forest,” in relation to distinctive trees, was widely used in British periodicals throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the phrase began to appear in US periodicals in the early nineteenth century, however, a shift occurred as writers started applying “of the forest” specifically to Native Americans. This essay examines how the phrase is used with increasing frequency in American literature, mission reports, and government documents during the decades leading up to the 1830 Indian Removal Act. I argue that print culture was used to reimagine Indigenous Americans as commodities, such as trees, to justify their removal from the landscape. The article is framed by an examination of how William Apess used his works, namely A Son of the Forest, to resist the State-sponsored violence of Jacksonian policies and Indian Removals. (JU)

Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Our Discipline

Abstract This essay situates Marianne Noble’s Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson (2019) and Hannah Walser’s Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (2022) in the current conversation our discipline has been having about sympathy/empathy. Noble and Walser describe ways of knowing other minds that avoid the dangers the discipline has associated with sympathy/empathy—foremost among them, the harm that comes from the assumption on the part of a witness to suffering that they can understand exactly what the sufferer is feeling. Noble finds in a group of nineteenth-century authors a conceptualization of sympathy that honors the differences between people and a state of benevolent not-knowing; Walser investigates how an overlapping cluster of nineteenth-century authors depicts ways of knowing other minds that do not require mind-reading. By making explicit the extent to which Noble’s and Walser’s exhilarating, rigorous studies align with our discipline’s association of empathy with a myriad of ethical harms, this essay seeks to carve out a space outside of this antipathy and suggest that literary sympathy can be seen as a narrative resource, with unpredetermined ethical effects, rather than an inevitable ethical lapse.This antipathy [towards empathy] has left the literary scholar with three options regarding [it]: (1) one can point out its dangers and offer more salubrious methods for interpersonal connection; (2) one can try to rescue empathy by demonstrating there are other ways of conceptualizing it; or (3) one can defend it.

Collecting Sarah Piatt at the Ohio State University's Rare Books & Manuscripts Library

Collecting Sarah Piatt at the Ohio State University's Rare Books & Manuscripts Library

:Neither the Time nor the Place: The New Nineteenth-Century American Studies

:<i>Neither the Time nor the Place: The New Nineteenth-Century American Studies</i>

The Editor’s Drawers

The Editor’s Drawers

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Jonathan Senchyne

Reviewed by: The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Jonathan Senchyne Alexandra Socarides JONATHAN SENCHYNE The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. xiv+194 pp. Long before Jonathan Senchyne published The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), I knew him as the nineteenth-century paper expert. Whenever I had a question about paper, I went to him, and whenever somebody I knew was thinking about paper, I’d ask them if they had talked to him. You might think that this is a small world–people who care about paper–but just a few months ago, a hybrid panel called “Interesting Stuff! Techniques and Approaches to Research with Paper” was held at Harvard University, and the event organizer reports that over a hundred people were in attendance. Why, you might ask, are so many people drawn to thinking and talking about paper? Senchyne’s book helps us answer this question, as it posits paper as a substance both around and within which so much happens. In literary studies, we are always pitching one thing against another: content/form, aesthetics/ideology, public/private, sound/sense. On the one hand, the very presence of paper invites more of these: material text/alphabetic text, bibliographic code/linguistic code, substrate/inscription. In other words, the very presence of paper as a subject of analysis forces us to think about the paper itself versus what the paper holds. Although he acknowledges that many people have been tempted to read paper in this way, Senchyne’s approach to paper is rooted in his desire to undo such a dichotomy. In his words: “Paper is the thin plane where presence and meaning, the ontic and mimetic, the bibliographic and the linguistic cohere and become mutually constitutive” (3). Or, later, “The way paper cuts across, or under, as it were, the division between manuscript and print dissolves the hold of that division on the mind” (19). Thinking about paper in this way sets Senchyne up to challenge theories of the print public sphere that depend on such binaries, arguing, eventually, against Habermas’s limited inclusion of public sphere subjects, since Senchyne shows that considering paper allows us to think instead about “a more diverse range of actors, [End Page 40] many of whom are women and laborers” (29). Paying attention to paper is, in this sense, a transformative experience on multiple levels. The opening chapter of The Intimacy of Paper provides the reader with everything they need to know about how paper was made in America between 1690 and 1867, and simply for this reason alone this book is an incredibly valuable contribution and will be used by a variety of different kinds of scholars for years to come. This period of rag paper production can be split into two periods: 1690–1817, when rag paper was made by hand, and 1817–1867, when rag paper was made by machine. Then, in 1867, “a wood-based pulp replaced a rag-based pulp as the primary ingredient in the majority of paper making” (12) and “ways of writing about one’s relation to paper changed markedly” (13). During this long rag paper period, an “intimacy” of, within, and because of paper is possible precisely because the traces of people who brought it into existence–the people who handled, collected, and worked with the rags–are present within it. And, as this book goes on to prove, literary texts that feature paper and papermaking bear this out. On the one hand, this intimacy is personal, since “writing about rag paper animates thought about readers’ sensual relationships with material texts, revealing similarities in ways of writing and feeling” (4), and, on the other hand, it is political, as Senychne argues that “rag paper drew people together into recognizably political, even national, affiliation before it circulated and was read as a printed text, or even as a precondition of a printed text’s circulation” (37). Once we understand that paper is not subsumed by meaning-making, and that its very presence in the lives of...

THE CHALLENGES OF TEACHING NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE AS PART OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE COURSE

This paper focuses on the challenges of including Native American literature in the course on nineteenth century American literature. Survey literature courses often feature canonical works and exclude minority or contrarian voices. My literature survey course includes the creation stories of four Native American tribes originating from different parts of the U.S., together with the works of contemporary Native American writers reflecting on the pre-colonisation and colonisation periods of American history. The process of teaching the course foregrounded the tensions between the dominant white settler mentality and the political and social marginality of Native Americans, making my students aware of the importance of multivalent analyses of literary and historical texts. Throughout the course, we discussed prevalent stereotypes about Native Americans in American literature. The experience of teaching this course leads me to the conclusion that it is important to discuss various marginalised voices in the survey courses on nineteenth century American literature. These texts reflect themes related to race, gender, religion, and ownership of land that go beyond literature to include social, political and historical issues, helping our students develop a better understanding of American culture.

Glancing Visions: Surface and Depth in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Zachary Tavlin (review)

Glancing Visions: Surface and Depth in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Zachary Tavlin (review)

From the Editor’s Gable

From the Editor’s Gable

시코랙스와 미란다 사이: 메리 시콜의 시민권 서사 실험

After more than a century of obscurity, the Jamaican nurse and Crimean war-hero Mary Seacole is now widely recognized as a figure of global importance in the wake of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter Movement. A biracial British woman born between a Scottish father and a Jamaican mother, Seacole published in 1857 an autobiography-travelogue titled Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. Emphasizing the indispensability and importance of Transatlanticism as a methodology in studying a Caribbean-born colonial subject such as Seacole, this paper draws upon recent scholarship of nineteenth-century American literature on citizenship to investigate the way Seacole makes an intervention into the dominant British national narrative of the nineteenth-century. In doing so, it turns to the hitherto neglected references and connection to William Shakespeare in Wonderful Adventures. Shakespeare’s The Tempest serves as the major intertext in this paper’s examination of the way Seacole subtlely yet powerfully revises and appropriates the narrative tradition around the female witch-healer with a dark complexion in her demand for a fuller British citizenship. Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) and Ivanhoe (1819) are discussed as texts presenting more recent versions of witch-healers of non-English origin with whom Seacole’s contemporaries were familiar.

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Jonathan Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), 194 pp., ISBN 978-1-62534-474-8 (paperback)

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert

Reviewed by: Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert Kate Culkin (bio) Abolitionism, Puritanism, Slavery Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination. By Kenyon Gradert. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 256. Cloth, $50.00.) [End Page 310] In this nimble, innovative monograph, Kenyon Gradert makes a compelling case for the role Puritans played in the rhetoric and imagination of American abolitionists. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he traces the complex ways a diverse group of reformers and authors invoked a vision of their ancestors—literal and figurative—as fiery, principled warriors to push for the end of slavery. Along the way, he makes notable contributions to the fields of nineteenth-century American literature, the history of abolition, and the use of historical memory. Central to Gradert's argument is the claim that abolitionists' Puritans differ dramatically from the twenty-first-century vison of dour, conservative, and repressed forefathers developed out of Cold War and New Americanist analyses. For the abolitionists, he claims, "the Puritans' militant zeal acquired a new value in light of an increasingly belligerent slave power and a complicit North" (7). They reached to the past to frame their cause as a holy war and add it to a timeline for the country that stretched from Puritans' principled stand through the American Revolution and towards a glorious future. For Gradert, the accuracy of their portrayal is not important; the significance lies in how these reformers chose to depict Puritans and what that depiction reveals about their thought-process and their time. Gradert combines biographical detail, historic context, and literary analysis while focusing on figures ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Henry Highland Garnet. The most compelling sections address the people who aimed to invoke Puritans' passion and moral character, while wrestling with what they knew to be a more complex heritage. In his discussion of Lydia Maria Child, for instance, Gradert traces how her attempts to maneuver her frustrations with the patriarchal limits of her Calvinist upbringing, the reserve of her Unitarian contemporaries, and the pressures of lobbying for abolition while trying to support herself and her husband through her writing led to The Kansas Emigrants. Calling it a "novella best described as half feminist Western and half Puritan errand into the wilderness," he argues that, in this understudied work about New England abolitionists in the midst of Bleeding Kansas, Child "rechannels the Puritan spirit away from New England and into women's heroism as the settlers continue their ancestors' unfinished errand" (64, 66). For James Russell Lowell, abolition offered a way to give his life as a poet meaning, and poetry gave him a way to reimagine Puritan heritage as a "powerful resource for a progressive democracy," but the death of his two nephews in the Civil War caused him to grow [End Page 311] wary of unmitigated zeal, even for a righteous cause (112). In the final chapter, Gradert explores how Black authors such as Garnet invoked both the Mayflower and the slave ship to claim their place in American society. Tracing the Puritan influence through such varied written works, in addition, allows Gradert to bring new insight to well-studied moments in abolitionist historiography, such as the schism in the American Anti-Slavery Society and Emerson's turn towards antislavery. The book is well-written and well-organized, and there is a clear logic to the chapters' groupings, done variously by genre, gender, race, and, in the case of the Beechers, family. Disrupting these silos, however, might have been powerful. Some of Gradert's most interesting observations come through his comparison of how Child and Emerson navigated similar territory, but he puts Child in the chapter with members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and Emerson with male orators, limiting the space for this exploration. However, the chapter on Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, grouped because of their family relationship, leads to insightful comparisons of the approaches of and options for a male minister and a female novelist; they take different routes to arrive at the same end, using Puritan images to espouse a communal vision of religion quite unrecognizable as the Calvinism...

In Memoriam

I first met Joel Myerson in an elevator at an American Literature Association Conference in Boston: he was wearing his famous Hawaiian shirt. Thereafter, I recognized his presence at various Alcott venues at ALA conferences: he always had something significant to remark upon after the talks were given. When I became more involved with the Alcott Society, I realized how sociable, warm, witty, and helpful he was at Alcott sessions and dinners. I remember an organized outing from an ALA meeting in Boston to the Alcott Orchard House in Concord, and he was clearly the life of the party.In terms of my scholarship on Louisa May Alcott, I could not have done as much without his co-edited collections (with Daniel Shealy) on Alcott’s letters and journals. This also holds true for his significant work on Margaret Fuller: I found his Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New York–Tribune, 1844–1846 (co-edited with Judith Mattson Bean) indispensable to several articles I wrote on Fuller. He knew and wrote so much about the Concord circle I admire, and he will forever be missed.Monika Elbert, Montclair State University One sheer delight of academic conferences was to come upon Joel Myerson, of course for conversation and commentary but to see what ghastly Hawaiian shirt he would be wearing. I think it actually glowed, but I may be wrong.Joel has done so much for so many. I recently came across Studies in the American Renaissance for 1994, which I believe he began to edit in 1983, and was staggered by the number of scholars within its pages. It is probably his monumental contribution to American Studies in all its many shapes and sizes and will remain a major repository of critical thinking. I gasped when I found an article I’d written, and he’d accepted, “The Romance of Mesmerism: Hawthorne’s Medium of Romance,” which helped launch me deeper into Hawthorne studies and beyond.Joel was a convivial and sharp-eyed mentor, good-humored and helpful. So many of us owe him so much. Here’s to you, Mr. Myerson. We couldn’t have done it without your thoughtfulness, patience, perspective and assistance. Thank you. You done real good!Sam Coale, Wheaton College Dr. Joel Myerson was an acclaimed editor and critic of nineteenth-century American literature. In Hawthorne Studies, Myerson edited an important work of Hawthorne’s collected writings, The Selected Letters of National Hawthorne (Ohio State UP, 2002). The titular collection he donated to the University of South Carolina Library includes early editions of Hawthorne’s works, as well as signed letters. Despite Myerson’s scholarly achievements, though, I most remember him because he helped solidify my career trajectory in American literature studies. As an MA student at the University of South Carolina, I signed up for his American Transcendentalism seminar one semester after doing poorly in a Renaissance Literature course. I wasn’t sure if graduate school was right for me. Myerson’s class only had doctoral students enrolled. This experience was the first time I had to collaborate and compete with them. From the moment the course started, I was transfixed. Everything he taught about Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott, and other nineteenth-centuryists spoke immediately to me—and I held my own in that course. After class, we would hold conversations on Thoreau’s theory of plant crystals or discuss how far south both Emerson and Thoreau had traveled. His compliments to me on my work were not liberally dispersed, but I hung on to every such word, including when he noted my “eloquence.” He had other acolytes in that class, several of whom, including myself, have gone on to become full-time English faculty. His guidance led to that success.Myerson eventually became my MA thesis advisor and provided general advice on that project, one that argues for Emerson’s unacknowledged influence on Proust, the latter whom Myerson seemed to dislike in the context I placed him. Later, he composed a letter of recommendation that ensured my admission to doctoral programs. I want to emphasize how powerful he was as a pedagogue and educator, at least immediately to us students, more so than his role as a scholarly editor. I had never known him to refuse a graduate student asking for mentoring or help. He left an indelible mark at the University of South Carolina; I can’t disassociate Myerson from my thoughts of that institution.Michael S. Martin, Nicholls State University

Critical Whiteness Studies and Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Abstract This article argues for implementing a Critical Whiteness studies approach to canonical White literature. After providing an overview of Critical Whiteness studies, I discuss examples from teaching nineteenth-century American literature where Critical Whiteness approaches are fruitful. Alongside widening the selection of what we teach in English departments, incorporating Critical Whiteness studies as part of decolonizing the curriculum reorients how we teach canonical White literature that remains on our syllabi and supports students to recognize continuing discourses of White supremacy today.

Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods In Antebellum US Literature by Laura Soderberg

Reviewed by: Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods In Antebellum US Literature by Laura Soderberg Paige Gray Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum US Literature. By Laura Soderberg. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. x + 200 pp. Paper $27.95, cloth $90. at an early point in Vicious Infants, an adept exploration of early American literary childhoods existing outside the idealized narratives perpetuated and normalized by white supremacy, author Laura Soderberg centers on the common practice of youth indenture as depicted in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and William Apess’s A Son of the Forest (1829). Here, she posits that, taken together, these texts help us “reframe how unfree labor connects child bodies to the public sphere and . . . subsequently shapes their relationship to the social [End Page 343] world as adults” (20). Soderberg’s ability to seamlessly incorporate legal and historical texts—as she does in this particular section by examining what indenture contracts suggest regarding the consent and autonomy of children who were Black, brown, or poor—helps make Vicious Infants a significant scholarly contribution to childhood studies, as well as, of course, nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Though there are places where the book’s momentum occasionally gets weighed down by dense language or academic jargon, and while there are other places where the discussion could have been fleshed out (for example, a section on Freud in the second chapter), these are slight criticisms. For in her skillful erosion of any presumed barriers between the literary and the historical via her shrewd close readings throughout the book, Soderberg reinforces the discursive nature of childhood through her impressive, important research. The book’s captivating title is more than just a catchy phrase underscoring the myth of childhood innocence. It is a nineteenth-century criminal designation. “An early alternative for the [legal] category of the minor,” Soderberg explains, “the term infant was generally used to classify subjects under the age of eighteen or twenty-one years old as holding different rights and duties than adult subjects” (24). Thus, “vicious infants,” as a phrase, also encapsulates the ways in which language predetermines the experience of childhood. Derived from the Latin in-fans, or “non-speaking,” “infant” works to “name an imposed silence, a declaration that the speech of a minor could not properly be recognized in court as the sign of intention or testimony” (25). Those young people unrecognized or marginalized because of antebellum legal and literary strictures shape Vicious Infants. The study’s unifying argument “pushes against any singular type of antebellum childhood, to which one is either admitted or refused” and instead advocates for “a broader vocabulary of multiple childhoods that each have their own relationship to civic and social life” (4). Now, to most childhood studies scholars, this notion may not be revelatory—the idea of varying models of childhood across time and space has been part of academic discussion since the publication of Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood (1960; 1962 English trans.). Yet each chapter’s specific engagement with the ways in which early American rhetoric of the white middle-and upper-class imagination codified and essentialized childhood rewards readers in its revisionary recasting of nineteenth-century childhood in the United States, which it accomplishes through considering textual gaps and silences—the textual in-fans. Following the strong opening chapter on indenture and social contracts, Soderberg turns to “the incorrigible child” and juvenile delinquency, unpacking the textual implications of domestic child-rearing manuals (from [End Page 344] well-known figures including Amos Bronson Alcott and Lydia Maria Childs) and institutional records from facilities such as the New York House of Refuge. In what may be the most compelling chapter, Soderberg brings to light the nineteenth-century racialized understanding of “prodigy” in antebellum medical discourse—that is, the “white tendency to treat Blackness as unpredictable and . . . as existing outside of genealogy,” which functioned “as a means of denying Black futurity” (83, 86). In her discussion of Susan Paul’s The Memoir of James Jackson, the Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months, which many argue is the first work of African American...

Reorienting “Lost” Time: Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in the American Civil War

Reorienting “Lost” Time: Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in the American Civil War Charlotte Hand (bio) Since Frank Luther Mott disparaged Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most influential women’s magazine of the American antebellum period, for being “absolutely untouched by the great conflict” that was the American Civil War, scholars have often claimed that the publication was apolitical during the sectional crisis.1 Susan Belasco, for one, argues that Sarah Hale, Godey’s editor from 1837 to 1877, “made no reference to the Civil War throughout the years of the conflict.”2 Scholars who have acknowledged the political impulse of Godey’s during the sectional tensions nonetheless suggest that the magazine only responded indirectly to them, never actually addressing partisan politics. Joseph Michael Sommers claims that in the years before the Civil War. Hale “appropriated seemingly innocuous sentimental modes and devices already present in the magazine” to rally her female readers against the secession of the southern states from the Republic.3 Despite recognizing Hale’s obvious call for national unity in her promotion of Thanksgiving in Godey’s, Patricia Okker writes off this effort for political peace as “idealistic and naïve.”4 It should be noted, too, that neither of these scholars examined Godey’s political effort during the Civil War. Yet the studies of Sommers and Okker demonstrate that Godey’s was very much concerned with the sectional tensions. It is high time, then, to re-examine Mott’s influential claim. These scholars’ dismissal of Godey’s participation in the partisan politics of the Civil War, whether as a refusal or as an oblique and thus politically ineffectual campaign, may be traced to two intersecting critical inclinations. First, an understanding of the Civil War as a battle between Union and Confederate forces over ideological differences and, eventually, slavery. Second, a rigid interpretation of the ideology of separate spheres as a spatial phenomenon. A predominant framework in criticism of nineteenth-century American literature during the mid-1960s, the ideology of separate spheres, [End Page 172] which determined that the proper roles of women and men were within the private and public domains respectively, has retained a spatial focus despite extensive revisions since. The metaphor of the separate spheres has also continued to occupy discussions on the ideology’s counterpart, the Cult of True Womanhood, an idealized image of the wife and mother as a domestic Madonna, and which set the social, aesthetic and political terms for the definition and performance of white middle-class womanhood. Indeed, modern scholars who have argued that the reality of white middle-class American women was vastly different from these ideologies that they themselves subscribed to—that the private sphere of white middle-class womanhood often converged with the public realm—relied on a spatial conception of these ideologies to demonstrate their claim.5 The spatial focus of their critique of these gender ideologies has led scholars to overlook Godey’s political attempt to ease sectional tensions. According to these strands of scholarship, Godey’s had refused to let its female readers venture into the male sphere of partisan politics and war—in other words, to keep the respective spheres of men and women separate, Godey’s had remained spatially removed from the Civil War. The current trajectory of nineteenth-century American studies does little to promote a re-examination of this assessment. Rightly recognizing that issues of race, sexuality, class, religion and other variables complicate the paradigm of the separate spheres, scholars of American studies have sought to move beyond a binary understanding of nineteenth-century America, rendering the ideology of separate spheres and True Womanhood obsolete concepts in the process. Consequently, publications like Godey’s that appear to promote the rigid gender demarcation of nineteenth-century American society that were aimed at white middle-class and elite women have garnered little critical interest from modern scholars. Yet Godey’s popularity demonstrates that the concept of separate spheres was influential in nineteenth-century middle-class society, even if it did not effectively condition gendered behaviors. It seems premature, then, to disregard these gender ideologies. As this essay will show, revisiting these ideologies sheds light on a critical battle that...

“That Grim Sphinx”: Literary Historicism and Tourgée’s Toinette Novels

Abstract [W]e need to continue the key conversation in the field about how to revitalize literary historicism. Matthew Arnold and Tourgée can help to contribute to this conversation. This essay puts the Reconstruction novelist Albion Tourgée in dialogue with the English critic Matthew Arnold in an effort to revitalize the role of literary historicism in American literary studies today. Specifically, it offers a case study of Tourgée’s three Toinette novels (1874, 1879, 1881), all relatively neglected, to make the case for the importance of continuing to study nineteenth-century American literature at least in part in a national frame, but one that takes account of the complexities of temporality. One of the functions of American literary criticism at the present time should be the continued recuperation of lost or neglected voices like Tourgée’s. A more pronounced attention to literary historicism, as the writings of both Tourgée and Arnold suggest, does not mean having to reproduce the exceptionalism and blindnesses of the past or present, especially if critics reject a rigid historical contextualism.

書評 Yoshiaki Furui, Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019, 239 pp.

書評 Yoshiaki Furui, Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019, 239 pp.

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson by Marianne Noble

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson by Marianne Noble

Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture by Eleanor Jones Harvey

Reviewed by: Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture by Eleanor Jones Harvey Laura Dassow Walls (bio) Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture eleanor jones harvey Smithsonian American Art Museum, in association with Princeton University Press 2020 444 pp. Few books on Alexander von Humboldt, the nineteenth century's world-famous explorer, scientist, and popular writer, are fully equal to their subject; this one is. It was created to accompany the exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture, which opened in March 2020—just days after COVID-19 shut down the nation—and ran through July 2021. Fortunately the exhibit lives on, thanks to the online materials which include an illuminating video tour and a trove of additional educational materials, suitable for classroom use from elementary grades through college courses. [End Page 302] Even more fortunately, the exhibit will live on for decades to come in the pages of this magnificent book. Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the SAAM, has not only assembled a stunning exhibition; she has also written a panoramic narrative that takes in the full sweep of nineteenth-century American science, politics, art, literature, and culture. The result is a mammoth volume, its dense text leavened with scores of supplemental illustrations and interleaved with 110 full-color plates reproducing the exhibition's artworks and historical documents, the whole beautifully bound and wrapped in a lavish cover. This all makes it look superficially like an exhibit catalogue, a coffee-table book suitable for idle browsing. It may be that, but it's also much, much more, a book that begs to be read and reread. The more one studies the complex conversation offered here between the narrative and images, the more pathways it opens for further inquiry. As for the text itself, Harvey has written a rich, detailed, and lengthy scholarly monograph that brings Humboldt's America, and Humboldt himself, fully to life. She draws on the full range of world scholarship on Humboldt (including several works by the author of this review); but to it she adds reams of new information drawn from her own original archival research, including revelatory passages from Humboldt himself that have never before appeared in English. Even the most experienced Humboldt scholars will find surprises on every page, and all will appreciate the thoroughly annotated citations in Harvey's lengthy footnotes. The volume is capped off with the exhibition catalogue, plus a "selected" bibliography that nevertheless runs for twenty-four of its elephant-folio pages. The result is arguably the finest and most extensive single volume in English on the profound and far-reaching impact on the United States by that world-renowned German scientist, explorer, diplomat, artist, writer, and all-around force of nature, Alexander von Humboldt. Suppressed after his death by authorities suspicious of his poetic prose and hostile to his prodemocratic, anti-imperial politics, Humboldt today is overshadowed by his followers—especially the most famous of them, Charles Darwin. But in his own day, Humboldt was widely recognized not only as the world's most famous living scientist, but also as one of the era's most famous human beings, the very icon of science itself, seen as a progressive and humanistic endeavor open to all. For most of the nineteenth century, he was a ubiquitous presence, a point of reference in science, politics, culture and the arts across the Americas, Eurasia, and the British Commonwealth. We live, said Emerson, in "the Age of Humboldt." [End Page 303] To unpack Emerson's statement is a tremendous project, as this book—which is literally so large and heavy that reading it is a project in itself—makes clear. Humboldt's vision is impossible to describe briefly because it embraced, literally, everything there is; as many have noted, he was perhaps the last human being in modernity who could attempt to hold all knowledge in one brain. One could call him encyclopedic, for he sought to behold the full extent of the natural world in one grand, interconnected unity: his writings ranged from the celestial sphere composed of stars...